Simple bidding for beginners

[mgoetze]

Hi all,

 

apparently I will soon have the opportunity to teach bridge to a handful of university students. I don't anticipate them jumping into more organised play (BBO/Club/whatever) afterwards, so while compatibility with how others bid might be a bonus, it's definitely not necessary.

 

So, the question is, what's the simplest bidding system I can teach them so they get into the action as quickly as possible?

 

Here are the ones I've been thinking about:

 

(1a) "Very natural", 1 of a suit shows 4+ of that suit, bid 4-carders up the line, 5-carders down the line. 1NT for a balanced 15-17 and 2♣ for anything very strong.

 

(1b) As above, but open your second-highest 4 card suit (in case of 4441).

 

(2) 5-card majors, better minor, 1NT for a balanced 15-17, 2♣ for anything very strong.

 

(3) Simple precision, 1♣ is 17+, anything else is 12-16, 5-card majors, 1NT 14-16, 2♣ clubs, 2♦ diamonds (or diamond shortness?), 1♦ catchall.

 

Does anyone have thoughts on this, or indeed experience teaching bridge to young adults?

 

Also, I'm wondering whether to teach Stayman and Transfers from the get-go or to start with 2-level nonforcing, 3-level forcing. Obviously the latter is simpler but the former avoids big changes later on.

 

Any hints welcome.

[jjbrr]

5-card majors, better minor, strong 2s, strong NT.

[bluecalm]

I think simple precision is the simplest and most logical for beginner system to play.

Just make sure you exclude all the transfers, asking bids, cabs, tabs and what not.

Focus on general bidding principles instead.

I believe sayc and 2/1 are too complicated with too many artificialicies and unavoidable problems in subsequent bidding. Many adv+ players don't grasp it let alone beginners.

 

I think transfers and stayman should be included in basic system.

People will encounter it all the time anyway so they will get used to it quickly. It's not like it's complicated for university students...

[helene_t]

I don't think any of the proposed systems is inherently more suitable for beginners than any other. Chose a system that you find logical yourself, i.e. one that you find easy to explain.

 

Also availability of teaching material is important.

 

5-card majors has obviously the advantage that it is what they will be exposed to on bbo, whether they will watch vugraph or play. And probably also at the local club, if you are in a 5-card majorscountry.

[peachy]

If you live in a 5-card major country, then 5-card majors, better minor, strong NT, 20-21 2NT, and artificial 2C for forcing opening and the concept of figuring as responder if your goal is partscore, game invite or game. Later on you can add weak twos, preemptive bids, Stayman, and Blackwood.

 

Or teach the system you are familiar with. Or the system for which you have the best teaching materials available. Or the system that "everybody" plays locally.

 

I would have the students play and defend hands as early as possible, even the very first class. Like play 1NT and try to take seven tricks even when they are not familiar with bidding yet. Those who are interested in bridge, typically have played other card games before. Even university students can get bored with all the numbers and points and rules and stuff. Bridge is afterall a game of taking tricks.

[mgoetze]

As I said, I'm sure the "whatever locals play" idea has its merits, but I just can't see these 20-25 year olds popping down to the local club where almost everyone is 50 or older. I want them to discover bridge as a fun game, and if they want to play with others later, I'll happily teach them another bidding system. But, as has been pointed out, 5-card majors, better minor does have some artificiality...

[pirate22]

the proposer has the right approach-KISS...I would recomend Acol-12-14 n/t.stayman-blackwood-logical card play-leads...this forms a simple start.

learn to walk before one runs.

then later on change to either simple precision-or sayc-this will come as a natural progression.

 

Kibbing is also a good asset--this allows understudying card play.

look up Mr Bridge---or EBU for tutorials on Acol

[helene_t]

Yeah, opening a 3-card minor may not feel very natural but if you teach them 4-card majors you have to deal with:

- Which 4-card to open? Up-the-line violates the general principle that majors (other things being equal) prevail. Yet ♥♠♦♣ has lots of exceptions.

- Smallest lie is about a minor suit length is something they will have to learn anyway, for example when responding to 1♠ with 3433.

- When to raise opener's suit with 3-card support?

- Overcalls, responses to 2♣ opening, weak take-outs of 1NT, most advances, most freebids all show a 5-card suit. The general principle is that if your first shape-describing bid is a natural suit bid then you show 5. So you might as well not teach them that 4-cards are biddable.

 

Anyway, if you think 4cM is easier to teach then go for it. Not sure if there are any modern text books on 4-card majors with strong NT. There are some reasonable ones with 4-card majors and weak NT.

[cherdanno]

Given they are 20-25, maybe you should teach them Rieneck standard?

 

I would always choose something fairly standard - e.g. maybe they will play against others on BBO; then they can pick up more from their opponents if their system is similar to the one they are using.

[jkdood]

I found Princeton Univ. students quite impatient and distracted with the ACBL Club series. Bidding in general was tedious, they wanted hands-on! (The Video Generation.)

 

I'd recommend as little bidding as possible to start and put them in predetermined contracts to see and feel "the play" ASAP.

[quiddity]

For a class of university students I wonder whether it could work to start with no system at all. Teach the mechanics of play and the scoring system and then pair them off and let them play, encouraging them to discuss and develop useful agreements as they go. Maybe after a session or two they will be interested in learning a standard system and will have a better sense of the underlying motivations.

 

I have no idea whether it would fly but it might be an interesting experiment.

[blackshoe]

In one of his books, Ron Klinger suggested what he called "from whist to bridge", a multi-step process that started with simple whist (no bidding, no trumps, iirc) and moved through to, eventually, bidding and play as in contract. As I remember it, this takes maybe two or three lessons to get through. If you continue with play of hands as well as bidding in each session, you're off to a good start.

 

Quiddity's suggestion is interesting, and might be fun for both students and teacher. I know that an awful lot of older players don't think much about why they play particular conventions, they just do it because that's how they were taught, or later because "everybody plays it". University students are likely, I think, to be more amenable to thinking about the why as well as the how.

[JanM]

I was also going to suggest not teaching bidding to start with. I'd go even farther than Quiddity, if the instructor has time and energy. I'd set up hands and tell the players the basic rules of card play and then say that one player on each hand is the declarer, the person opposite is the dummy, and that declarer's goal is to take some number of tricks (I think I'd make the number 9 to start with, but wouldn't bother to tell them why) and the goal of the defenders is to stop declarer from taking 9 tricks. I'd make the first set of hands pretty simple (you could use the hands from Bridgemaster's lowest level for a start), but ones where either declarer or defense might prevail. I'd have a different person be the declarer on each hand. I'd start with no trump, and then after they have the idea of trick taking, add in a trump suit.

 

Good bidding really depends on understanding play, it's always seemed backward to me to teach bidding first and play second ;).

[Flameous]

The simplest system of all: Phantom Club.

You always bid as if your RHO opened with 1♣. (1♣ as a double)

 

You only have to teach overcalls and take out doubles what you need to do anyways. ;)

[Cyberyeti]

For a class of university students I wonder whether it could work to start with no system at all. Teach the mechanics of play and the scoring system and then pair them off and let them play, encouraging them to discuss and develop useful agreements as they go. Maybe after a session or two they will be interested in learning a standard system and will have a better sense of the underlying motivations.

 

I have no idea whether it would fly but it might be an interesting experiment.

Start with minibridge and do the bidding later.

[Diogen_]

System:

http://www.ecatsbridge.com/documents/files...FCard+notes.pdf

 

Free bridge lessons:

http://www.bridgesights.com/hondobridge/

http://home.comcast.net/~kwbridge/

http://www.rpbridge.net/bbtc.htm

[helene_t]

Yeah you should not teach bidding before they know how to play and know the key objectives of bidding such as which contracts are game.

 

Now university students learn a lot quicker than the students we usually have at bridge lessons so maybe they can learn mini-bridge in 3 or 4 lessons and then proceed to bidding.

[Ant590]

This doesn't answer your questions, but I strongly suggest you:

 

(1) For half the session length, have everyone (including experienced players) playing minibridge. Depending on numbers 1 experience player with 3 novices at each table works well. Talk about cardplay points as they come up (finesses, not cashing high cards in defence always, counting trumps, second hand low, etc). Remember that beginners will get bored of bridge much quicker than a seasoned bridge player.

 

(2) Then explain to the novices (some of whom will have had enough of cards by now), that the beginners part of the session is over, and in the rest of the session the more experience players will play against each other, and anyone who wants to stay and learn some more can do. No system restrictions for the experienced tables, it's good for the novices to see some proper action and camaraderie at the table.

 

(3) Those beginners that stay in the second half can either kibitz the mayhem that results when experienced players are given bidding after a couple of hours of minibridge, or can begin to learn the system you have chosen to teach them with you on a side table.

 

(4) About half way through the term you will know who the more keen players are (those that stay for the second half). Preferably you will have some kind of "B" side that you can explain to them that, if they manage to follow the basic bidding you've taught them then they can represent the university in the B team. Moreover, you'd like them to start forming partnerships, playing with the same person more than not. (This has the added bonus that both sides of the pair will feel obliged to show up each session).

 

(5) Allow the novices to bid with crib sheets for as long as they feel it's necessary (yes this is painfully slow).

 

We did this for four years in a row during term 1 (Oct-Dec), to some success, managing to attract 10-15 new regular players to the club. TBH the system choice is of small significance; at some point a keen novice will buy a random book, and its ideas (which are in print, so must be better than what they currently have been told) will propagate ideas between the partnerships.

 

EDIT:

One other thing. If you have a likeminded club in the area, arrange an "away day" to them, where some of their more experienced players will partner your club members in a pro-am. Make sure to give the club players the crib sheets and be prepared for a wide variety of poor advice from the club players. The point of the away day is to show the students that there is more to bridge than the uni bridge club. The standard of local players may mean that this is a poor idea, natch.

[mgoetze]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm afraid some have overestimated the scale of my endeavour, at first it will be just me and 3 or 4 beginners, and start as a one-off. Being able to start a university group would be nice, of course, I'll see how it goes.

 

I might indeed start off with minibridge, though I don't really like announcing the number of HCP - if I get 4 beginners I will perhaps just wander around the table and tell them who will be declarer.

 

@Arend: Rieneck Standard would indeed be an idea except that the Rieneck camp is mostly at the same time as the European Go Congress. :-(

[Little Kid]

Some good suggestions here, which I will also bear in mind when I'll try to resurrect our university bridge club in October ;)

[kenberg]

I learned contract bridge in 1961 by reading Goren's Contract Bridge for Beginners. This brings up several thoughts. I was 22 and in grad school. Something on the order of your target audience.

 

First, "beginners" is not entirely well-defined. Everyone played cards in Minnesota, even those who thought it a sin. I was a beginning bridge player but not a beginning card player. Taking tricks, trump suit, leads, playing in turn all made sense. There is primitive bidding in games such as 500.

 

Next: I played cards, whether hearts, poker or bridge, with friends at someone's house. I didn't know a thing about clubs, tournaments, duplicate, etc and when I learned of their existence I didn't care.

 

I recall Goren saying something like "Bridge was explained to me as a game where you have to follow suit if you can, if not you can trump" . Not a bad first line.

 

I like the idea of just playing out some hands without bidding. Maybe begin with notrump. Tell them to take as many tricks as they can. Then play some more hands, setting a certain number of tricks as the goal. After that, the idea of bidding to a makable contract will make sense, and scoring can be introduced to show why you want to contract for 9, or 12, tricks at no trump when the chances are decent that you can take 9, or 12.

 

Bidding as a language enabling progressive revelation of each other's hands was a new concept. Once that made sense, a few artificial calls such as Stayman and Blackwood were not really that difficult to grasp.

 

 

Check back to see if what you say conveys what you mean. A more experienced player told me not to underlead kings. OK, sounds weird but he is (from where I stood) the expert. So the next time that I chose to lead a suit with a king in it I led the king. It is with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement that I relate this, but it's a true story.

 

I hope you enjoy the experience.

[Free]

If you want to keep them at the table I think you should definitely focus on the play, but not too much to avoid them hating the bidding phase later on.

 

Something very important in the bidding: keep it simple and follow some rules. Accept that you won't reach the best contract every time, especially at this moment. Some simple form of sayc will do.

[jimbelk]

I have about a year's worth of experience teaching bridge to small groups of college students. (We play every week in the math lounge, and beginners often participate.) For a complete beginner, it is not really practical to teach ANY bridge bidding system to start with, except for the basic understanding that all bids should be natural.

 

Of course, there needs to be some "hidden system" that you have in mind to advise players on how to bid. I would definitely suggest a strong 2♣, with other two-level bids being weak, but there's no particular reason to mention it until they try to open a strong two, or until an experienced player tries to bid a weak two. Beginners tend to enjoy opening weak twos once they learn about them.

 

My experience is that beginners find five-card majors confusing, especially since they don't yet understand the importance of major suits over minor suits. I would stick with 4-card majors to start with, and there's no particular reason to give them a specific rule on which suit to open with 4-4. (Say something general like "try to plan ahead and think about what you will bid next".) Don't switch to 5-card majors until they're ready to learn an actual bidding system.

 

Strong notrumps will work fine, although they will come up so rarely that the beginners won't ever learn how to bid over them. Most beginners will try to open 1NT the first time they get a minimum balanced hand, and you will have to tell them that a 1NT opening actually shows some extra strength. (It's possible that weak notrumps would work better, but I haven't tried.)

 

The one artificial convention that they will need early on is takeout doubles. This will come up the first time one player has a strong hand after another player opened.

 

It's really hard to get beginners to invite or bid game. Instead of giving them ranges for invites, my experience is that it works better to tell them that game requires 25 points total, and then let them work it out for themselves. It also helps to provide them with some very simplified version of the scoring, so that they can see a clear advantage in bidding game. I like to use the following:

* 2 points for making a partscore

* 5 points for bidding and making game

* 10 points for bidding and making slam

* 20 points for bidding and making grand slam

* 1 point/undertrick for setting the opponents

These numbers have been chosen so that it makes sense to bid game with a 50% chance of making, etc., and so that sacrifices work about the same way as they do normally. (For a doubled contract, just double the bonus for setting the opponents, or add a flat +2 for making.)

 

I haven't tried teaching precision to beginners, but I think they would find it somewhat confusing. Also, the ACBL's Learn to Play Bridge software is so good that it would be a shame to teach them a system that isn't compatible with it.

 

Finally, try not to get into the habit of telling them how to play contracts, how to defend, or what to bid every time. If you always answer questions of the form "What should I bid with this hand?", then they will never stop asking. Of course you will need to help with bidding a bit to start with. But as soon as possible, they need to start making decisions on their own, so that they can experiment with what sorts of bids lead to good or bad results.

[Free]

Wow you give your students a lot of freedom in the choices they make! I wonder if this really is a good approach, because they don't know anything yet.

 

It's like teaching someone to play chess, but only explain how to move their pieces. They won't learn about development, middle game strategy, end game strategy,... They'll lose all the time and won't know why. How can they ever learn something?

 

If you show them how it should be done, and especially why (very important), you get much better results imo. They'll start seeing paterns, similarities,... and get some understanding about the game instead of memorizing their lessons.

[Mbodell]

Well, it probably depends on environments. If you don't give the students more direction and put them in a duplicate game it wouldn't be great, but if they just play amongst themselves, it wouldn't matter. Same thing with the chess, if you don't teach them endgame and openings and they just play amongst themselves they'll develop their own styles for a while.

 

I think it is probably a good idea if you have a group of beginners and can swing them developing together.